English has seven words that behave very strangely when you change them from the singular to the plural. These are called THE MUTANT PLURALS of English. They're super cool.
The plural of "whale" is "whales", but what's the plural of "child"? David, Khan Academy's resident grammarian, explains.
An introduction to how English uses italics and underlining.
How do you know when to use "less" and "fewer" when describing things?
KA grammarian Paige introduces an important piece of punctuation that helps link items in a sentence: the colon!
In a previous video, we established that one thing verbs can do is show actions, like "the bear runs." Verbs can also link ideas to one another, like "the bear looks cheerful.".
David and Paige introduce you to the superhero of the punctuation world: the comma!
Prepositions help show us where things are in space and time.
There's a class of helper verbs known as modals that we use to express a bunch of conditions: we can use them to give advice, make guesses at how necessary or likely something is, make requests of people, and so on. They're super useful.
David and Paige, KA’s resident grammarians, discuss tag questions, yes and no statements, and direct address -- all situations where the comma is super useful.
Parallel structure isn’t a set rule, but more of a stylistic choice: it helps sentence elements maintain a pattern. This is a very special episode because it’s Paige’s last video with us as a KA intern! We will miss having Paige as a contributor to the Grammar Team.
Parentheses set off extra information (such as a writer's remarks, an interruption, or a reference) from the rest of a sentence. Learn how to use them in this video!
You use the perfect verb aspect to express when an action is completed, like "I have done the dishes.".
We use the perfect progressive aspect to talk about an action that was once ongoing, but has since completed, like "I had been waiting for twenty minutes.".
Let's meet the personal pronouns!
A phrase is any collection of words that behaves like a part of speech, like a noun phrase (“my brother Stu”), an adjectival phrase (“in a different shade of blue”), or an adverbial phrase (“with elegance and tact”). A clause is any noun phrase plus a verb; they can be sentences, but they don’t always have to be. You’ll see!
Do words that end in "s" still need _'s_ to show possession? David and Paige explain!
Possessive pronouns describe what things belong to which people, like "her shoe" or "the book is mine." Possessive pronouns can be adjectives, like "his bicycle," or they can stand in for nouns, like "the seats are theirs." Neither of these forms should have apostrophes to show possession -- so it's ours (not our's) and yours (not your's).
Prepositional phrases are word chunks that begin with a preposition.
Some prepositions describe relationships between people or things. These prepositions don’t include information about time or space.